Thank you, Mr. Speaker. On Friday, the 2021-2022 Capital Budget estimates were tabled in this House. This is the first capital budget of this Assembly. It is the largest capital estimates ever tabled. Many of these large infrastructure projects are carryover from the past years. There are many reasons that this happened. One thing I do know is that many times when we have these large infrastructure projects, there are very low percentage of NWT residents working on these projects or are the main contractors of these projects. What concerns me is the fact that, over the years, schools have had to make tough decisions on what programs their students have with the budgets that they're provided. The teacher's salaries go up and the programs seem to be lost. There is just not enough money there.

I've seen most of the CTS courses in my community be cut, which would include the carpentry or shop classes I remember, welding, auto mechanics. In a place like Inuvik these classes may only happen if we get a teacher who can teach them while also teaching some of the core classes like math, science, English. In the small communities, you're lucky to have any of those programs at all.

Mr. Speaker, we also don't have any regular scheduled introduction courses into the trades in my community through the college. How do we ever expect to increase the amount of qualified tradespeople when they're not given the opportunity to experience these areas during school or enter into any intro programs as they have in the past years? With the deficit that we've heard in infrastructure in the Northwest Territories and lack of qualified tradespeople we will continue to bring out-of-territory businesses and tradespeople so the money will continue to leave our territory. This is unacceptable and does not benefit our economy for years to come. I will have questions for the Minister of Education, Culture and Employment. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.